Majority Of Mobile Sites Not Tracked Via Google Analytics, Research Finds

There are over 234 million Americans with mobile phones at the moment in the United States, aged thirteen and upward, according to the latest comScore report. Almost half of them go online off their phones and 100 million of those mobile phone users own smart phones.

Nowadays, people are using their mobile devices more than their desktop computers and those figures and ratios are only expected to grow in 2013. That being said, it makes perfect sense that mobile should be regarded as the future of web development, as well as of online marketing and advertising. However, while this seems to be the catchphrase of the moment, the facts and figures are not entirely supporting it.

According to a research report issued by Mongoose Metrics, of all the websites whose desktop versions are being tracked via Google Analytics, and which also have a mobile version, 37 per cent do not track traffic and other stats on their mobile version as well. There might be several explanations behind this, but this still doesn’t make the situation any more reasonable.

Google Analytics statistics are the top tool that your SEO pros have for working toward an improved experience for your website’s end-users. Here are a few pointers to check out, in order to avoid falling into the trap of overlooking Google Analytics.

Add the code to your mobile site now

You can use the special non-Javascript code, but for most cases, the normal one will work just fine, as the ‘mobile site tracking’ option can usually be side-stepped.

If your mobile site is getting numerous hits from non-smartphone mobile devices, you’d be missing out on the stats from that segment of your traffic (as feature phones don’t support Java). However, for most websites, the proportion of traffic from such sites is negligible.

Approach the ‘m.’ case wisely

Use the same UA-XXXXX-Y account to track your mobile site, as you do your desktop site. In order to do this, you will need to tweak the code on both websites, or website versions.

The tweak will allow the m.domainname.com to be tracked as a sub-domain of your desktop site. This practice is referred to as cross-domain tracking by Google and it’s highly recommended for mobile sites.

Set up a distinct profile for the mobile site

This one is basically self-explanatory. If you follow the above pointer, you will find it much easier to keep track of mobile metrics and, consequently, to get as clear a picture of your site’s performance as possible.

Current stats indicate that, of the Quantaserve top million websites, a large part of them do not use Google Analytics. However, a closer look at the graph generated by Mongoose Metrics indicates that the top 100,000 websites are not completely ignoring this essential tool.

As a matter of fact, the more one descends toward the end of the rankings, the fewer Google Analytics is one likely to come across. Lesson to be learned here: if you want to be in the top 100,000, you need to get cracking on Analytics Code implementation a.s.a.p..

Jamal Shane is a SEO content writer and blogger hobbyist, who has been writing about website content improvement strategies for two years now. In the meantime, the traffic on his own website has been soaring, which also makes it important to note that he’s got a great recommendation for a search engine optimization agency.